Reviews from

in the past


Look, I don't care if it's juvenile. Monster trucks are fuckin' cool. The sheer concept of a colossal vehicle built to literally crush other cars underneath it's gargantuan wheels fills me with delight, and not only can you play as one in this, but there's also a mechanic where if you run into another car from behind you'll drive over them and get a speed boost. This effectively makes the monster trucks in Off-Road Challenge the racing game equivalent of a grappler, and that's the sickest crap ever.

If that doesn't convince you, then how about watching an AI car drive into a passing by train and have the train be the loser in the exchange and explode into pieces? That sight left more of a mark on me than any racing sim this past decade I tells ya, and every time you set a record you're given a compliment and told "you're hot". Thank you Ms. Challenge! Midway arcade racers always got my back.

IGN: "oh oooh! the frame rate!"

gives IGN a swirly and steals their underpants

Kinda went into Pentiment expecting to have to "eat my vegetables"; its aesthetic being artistically sound, but not really the kind of thing I'm generally into, and its premise sounding intellectually invigorating in a games industry that's arguably in arrested development when it comes to making mainstream experiences for adults, but maybe not enough to keep me personally going for a playtime of over 20 hours. And well, I was pretty fuckin' wrong! And not even in the Disco Elysium way where after I got over the hurdle of the first hour or two that it finally clicked (not to say that Disco Elysium's intro isn't basically perfect in its own way), Pentiment managed to sink its teeth into me right away. The game's art is also a lot more affective and unique than I would've expected just from the couple trailers I'd seen, and despite the entire game taking place across only a handful of screens (contextualized as pages in a book), there were many times that I found myself stopped in my tracks, contemplating the beauty of a specific moment.

It's also just as real as fuck without succumbing to either condemnation or romanticization. Pentiment's perspective on history and the people who shaped it is complex without cowardly labeling every participant as a morally grey agent -- there are unabashedly terrible and evil people in this world, people who are deceptive in their self-servitude, and even inarguably cruel entities like the Catholic Church house individuals who really do want to make the world a better place in their own way and even people who are in the church due to societal forces beyond their control. Pentiment is a game that tries its best to be honest about the world. It's also a game that's absolutely more intelligent and worldly than I'll ever be, and I really don't think I can do it the full justice it deserves in my own analysis of its setting and themes, so I'll just leave it there.

And yeah, Pentiment is also just a great example of how to make a dialogue-focused adventure game fun. Like, part of that is probably because I chose hedonism as one of my skills and made Andreas into a terrible little boyslut, but you know how it is. The dialogue never bored me, every character feels truly alive -- and that's without voice acting! I actually appreciated that there wasn't any honestly, it's a double-edged sword in a lot of games like this, and it only would've detracted from the bespoke aesthetic decision to give every character's spoken dialogue in "their own handwriting", in quotes because I'm not entirely sure what the implication was for the characters that are by their own admission illiterate (but I did love that Claus the town printer's dialogue is the only one that uses an actual typeface, accompanied by the satisfying thuds of a printing press).

By the end of the game, Tassing really does begin to feel like your home as well, not only because many pivotal events in Tassing's recent history are influenced by the player, but because you've grown close to the town's citizens and watched them grow and change as well. Pentiment isn't a power trip in that sense -- you cannot save everybody or give everybody a happy ending, not that you'd want to with some of the assholes you run into honestly -- but it does manage to encapsulate the warm and fuzzy feeling that despite the world being dogshit, we can still do our best for those around us, be a part of a greater whole with honest fervor. The player and Andreas will inevitably fuck up a lot, but it's something we have to live with, something to learn from. Things like that feel self-evident in the real world and are rarely explored properly in games, but the fact that Pentiment lacks a manual save function really sells that feeling. But even if we can't meta-game Tassing into the perfect little Bavarian town suffering under feudalism and religious oppression, the Tassing we end up with is undeniably ours. I think that's probably why I might never replay Pentiment, which is rare for me, since I tend to replay games I love quite often.

Also the "third act" is pretty good! Saw some people criticizing the shift in gameplay focus, but it was a nice change of pace and was probably my favorite part altogether. Don't normally recommend games on here, but honestly, check it out for yourself. I can't really think of many demographics that'd be outright disappointed by Pentiment. It's good. :)

SpongeBobAndPatrickRidingChildrensRollerCoaster.jpeg

A remake of one of RPG Makers most famous games. It is one of the most famous for good reason. This short (I beat it in 55 minutes) horror puzzle trial and error game is well crafted. It’s so short I would definitely say wait until you see a sale on it but I got it on sale for $8 and it is 100% worth that and an easy recommend for a short solid game.

That ending, especially as a father to a little girl, fucked me up.

black panther for dudes who say oh my hylia


A very fun and lovely little rhythm game! My only complaint is how short it is. I’d love to see this get the Kirby Fighters 2 treatment with a bunch of extra songs. (Genuinely shocking that it hasn’t yet)

Easily one of if not probably THE largest scope single-player game I've ever played, and somehow rarely unwavering in quality through the entire 100+ hours. Not only is there an incredible, nearly unmatched level of variability in the gameplay, from sidequests to minigames to main story content, but each of these pieces clearly has an equal amount of effort put into them. Nothing is left behind in favor of anything else; there is so much care put into the smallest minigames and sidequests and songs all the way up to the biggest scale story set pieces. I am truly in awe at the scale of this game and find it incomparable to nearly anything in this sense other than perhaps Elden Ring.

I was fully engrossed in this world, in every area, for just about the entirety of my playthrough, and really did not want my adventure to end. I was very motivated to do the majority of side content, simply because of how good it all was, with a random sidequest more than once leading to a completely unique minigame challenge I wouldn't have discovered otherwise. The combat evolves from the first game significantly; I loved the synergy abilities and additions to each of the original party members plus the new party members equally. Everyone is fun to use in their own way and I LOVED how the game separates the party in the story quite often, forcing you to try out different combinations of characters. Not only that, but each of the specified party sections typically will have enemies and/or a boss that is designed for the combat around the members you're using, whether it being aerial enemies with Barret/Yuffie, or perhaps physically aggressive enemies with Red to block and counter with, or fast enemies with Tifa, just as an example. I wish more RPGs with larger parties would do this, as deciding who to use while also wanting to use everyone somewhat equally is something I often struggle with.

I was a fan of FF7 Remake, but it was far from one of my favorite games of all time. Rebirth has more than lived up my greatest expectations and absolutely is one of the best games I've ever played. Any of its shortcomings, mostly in the form of a couple sub-par minigames or sidequests, or some world traversal issues, absolutely do not take away from the spectacle of the adventure and world. I did not even mention Queen's Blood, which is easily my favorite of the various evolving Final Fantasy side-games, and is a great game in and of itself. The soundtrack is also no question one of the greatest ever made, from beginning to end, with the massive quantity of tracks all of incredible quality. I really do love the Final Fantasy VII universe, and I would be shocked to see anyone that doesn't after playing this game. I cannot wait what is in store in the final part of this already legendary trilogy.

10/10

Achei tão bom quanto o primeiro, embora muitas coisas continuem parecidas ( menu, estética, personagens ). Agora eu já comecei acostumado aos controles e timing das notas, e tbm sabendo q podia dobrar as notas com os raios.
Joguei principalmente pq tem 2 músicas fodas q eu gosto : "Mother" e "Free Bird", então tinha tudo pra ser um jogaço ( e foi ).

>> Prós
• SOUNDTRACK : É Guitar Hero, não preciso falar nada sobre esse ponto/2.
• DESAFIO : Novamente, tão desafiador quanto o primeiro foi mas dessa vez eu já peguei o jeito.
• JOGABILIDADE : Novamente, a jogabilidade no controle tá boa e fluída.
• SKINS : Curti q colocou skins compráveis para os personagens também.
• ENCORE : As músicas extras no final de cada lista é algo bem legal, metade das músicas q foram encore eu curto : "Carry on Wayward Son", "Sweet Child o'Mine", "Stop" e "Free Bird" ( inclusive achei sacanagem ser da última lista, acabou sendo a última música do game e a q eu queria tocar mais antes de começar a jogar ).

>> Contras
• Nenhum.

>> Música Favorita = "Carry on Wayward Son", "Cherry Pie", "Free Bird", "Jessica", "Killing in the Name", "Mother", "Stop" e "Sweet Child o'Mine".

>> Listas
• Opening Licks = 4/5
• Amp-Warmers = 3.5/5
• String Snappers = 3/5
• Trash and Burn = 4/5
• Return of the Shred = 4/5
• Relentless Riff = 4/5
• Furious Fretwork = 3.5/5
• Face-Melters = 4/5

This review contains spoilers

they really should just commit to making a musical at this point

-

Following up on remake's worst tendencies, the rest of disc 1 of final fantasy 7 is turned into a low stakes road trip game. Seeing the 7 party banter and have fun is enjoyable, it was my favorite part of this game, but it comes at the cost of making this game's pacing bizarre. Every town the party exclaims "let's hang out for a bit and have some fun!" even though all they've been doing is hanging out and having fun the entire game. Another downside to the hanging out is the character writing is way less consistent in this game than in Remake. Remake’s characterization of everyone was rock solid and well done, whereas stuff like Tifa and Aerith forming the weird Anime Girl Hivemind in most scenes they share here was really awkward. The additions of Elena, Yuffie, and Cait Sith were all really well done though, those three really shine in this game.

Every open world section between towns is completely cut off and unrelated to the rest of the game, and unlike FF’s last open world game, party interaction or dialogue is completely absent unless you’re on a sidequest. The maps are filled with Tasks to do, and none of it matters or even gives you much besides some light combat challenges or minigames (though the game is not in short supply of these, wow). Chadley and Mai are the only two characters in 90% of the open world, and while they’re fun, the world feels so strange and empty the entire game.

Despite my slight disappointment with the open world though, nearly all of my negative feelings on this game are centered on its story. Despite all of the fuss of the last game, this game rarely deviates from final fantasy 7’s plot, and even when it does it quickly snaps back into line, seemingly afraid you’ll actually have anything interesting to ponder during the 100+ hours it’ll ask of you.

Every emotional scene of the original is recreated here, but always with a terrible twist. Barret and Dyne are having a deeply emotional confrontation, the fight is compelling, the voice acting is well done, the scene is working BUT WAIT the camera pans from Barret clutching Dyne’s body to Palmer the goofy Shinra man in a dumb mech for a comedy boss fight in the middle of the cutscene for absolutely no reason. The return to Dyne after the fight as if the moment could still possibly work was so insane I set the controller down to just sit, stunned, for a minute. After a massively protracted dungeon, Red XIII is finally learning the truth about his father, the statue sheds a tear, the music is swelling, and the camera swings to the side to reveal an unhinged tribal caricature ghost man who opens the wall to lead you to a new dungeon about how the Cetra are now racist and so we can give the black materia Lore instead of it being part of the very obvious metaphor of the original.

These twists are all leading to The Moment though, the one everyone’s been debating about since Remake came out, Are They Going To Kill Aerith Again? And to answer that question, awful MCU brainrot has been introduced, with a new AU timeline where Zack is around (though it amounts to basically nothing) and Sephiroth 2 from the last game trying to combine the multiverses to ensure the plot of final fantasy 7 happens as it did originally (for some reason???) and fighting Cloud at a different edge of creation from the last game, and blowing a Sephiroth boss form from the end of 7 for good measure. All of this culminates in Cloud saving Aerith, but the game saying “just kidding” and killing her anyway. Even the scenes after her death are ruined by cutting the burial altogether, a completely baffling move.

In the end, I’m walking away from Rebirth with a bad taste in my mouth, but I still had fun throughout. Despite the open world feeling strange and the game feeling much too long, the gameplay part was pretty fun! Several of the minigames were engaging, the open world was good looking, and Triple Triad 2 Queen’s Blood was genuinely really fun. I really enjoyed the battle system this time too, it clicked way better for me this time than it did in Remake. It’s no FF13 ATB but it’s pretty good. It’s just a shame about the rest of it.

(Also, this is mostly a consequence of the game not being static detailed backgrounds anymore but FF7 has some truly incredible backgrounds, and shinra manor and the forgotten capital were some of the strongest in the original game. Rebirth shinra manor being one floor and a characterless basement and the forgotten capital being two screens long and filled with dementors from the last game was deeply disappointing compared to the remarkable atmosphere the original backgrounds had.)

((also holy shit 3D brawler is the hardest thing in the game by a huge margin, i think that minigame is evil))

Have you ever had a moment where you fuck up royally at something, and you just wish that you could go back and do it over again so that it turns into a positive memory of your life? I’m sure we have all had those instances of memories we wish we could forget, as I definitely wish I could forget about a lot of the fuck ups I made in the past, or to go back and remedy those situations. Unfortunately, unless we ever invent time travel, that will most likely never happen. With video games and other forms of media, though, that is a different story. You could release something that many consider pretty lackluster, bad, or just flat out god-awful, and the people that worked on it could live in shame for the rest of their lives because of it, or, on the other hand, you could go back to what you had before, change some things up or rebuild it entirely from scratch, and you could redeem said product by making it much better in the public’s eyes. One such instance of this happening would be with the dated title known as New Adventure Island.

So, technically, this game is not a remake of the original Adventure Island, and it is instead just another game that was made in the Adventure Island series, but from what I have played here, it may as well be a remake. It shares a lot of very similar elements with the original game, from the levels to the things that you fight, even down to the bosses, which could be seen as a bad thing right out of the gate. I have mentioned plenty of times in the past that I think that the original Adventure Island, and the original Wonder Boy to an extent, are bad games, being extremely repetitive, way too difficult, and just not fun to play through after a while. Thankfully though, this game pretty much takes a lot of the problems that the original game had and fixes it, making a pretty good game out of it. I wouldn’t say it fixed all my major gripes with that original game, but it does make things a lot more fun to play, while also being charming and fast at the same time.

The story is all too familiar for every game in this series, where Master Higgins gets married to Tina in a glorious ceremony at the church, but all of a sudden, the evil Baron Bronsky comes down and not only kidnaps Tina, but also the many island children that have come to enjoy the ceremony, so in a fit of rage, Master Higgins then sets out to once again save Tina, all of the island children, and defeat the Baron once and for all, which is about as generic as a story for this series gets, and it does nothing more then continuing to make me feel bad for Higgins, as the guy just can’t have a relationship without someone kidnapping his girl. The graphics are fantastic, having a wonderful art style that I don’t want to stop looking at, even if the animations for the enemies and bosses leave a lot to be desired, the music is pretty good, having plenty of energetic and cheery tunes, along with some more menacing ones that were also nice to hear, and the control/gameplay is… well, it is an Adventure Island game, so you should know by now what to expect.

The game is a 2D action platformer, where you take control of Master Higgins yet again, go through six different worlds, each with four levels a piece, along with a seventh final stage, dodge plenty of enemies along the way or defeat them using whatever weapons that you may find on your journey, gather plenty of weapons, extra lives, and food items to keep your hunger bar from depleting completely, and take on several fun, albeit very similar bosses that will take some time to take down if you aren’t too careful. For those who have played any other Adventure Island game, especially the original game, then a lot of this will feel very familiar to you, but it does still manage to be very fun most of the time, and it does feel a lot better to play than the original game.

Like I mentioned before, the game is very similar to that of the original game, having very similar level structures, level themes, and the same type of bosses, but thankfully, this game manages to fix all of that by adding in a wonderful little spice of life known as variety. While the level layouts don’t change all too much, all the environments, hazards, and the types of enemies you can encounter change throughout the game, making things visually distinct and interesting for most of the journey and fun to play through, even if it isn’t as interesting as other games. Not to mention, while most of the bosses are the same dude with the head of a different creature, each one has a different attack, such as one that creates a wall of ice spikes to send shooting at you, or one which sends a wave of fire arching towards you. Each one is defeated the same way, but the way that you approach these fights is slightly altered each time, which does make things a lot more fun and engaging, which I really appreciate.

In addition, some elements that were brought into the series in previous sequels are also brought into this title as well. You now have multiple weapons that you can find throughout the land, such as spears, boomerangs, and fireballs, and while most of them work the exact same way, some end up doing more damage than others, making it so that you wanna stick with one weapon for as long as you can for the most effect. And finally, I know I already brought this up earlier, but I absolutely love the visuals in this game, and they help make me want to play more of it so that I can enjoy every second of this. It’s just such a cute art style, and it really shines in instances such as whenever you beat a world, and before the next one, you are greeted with a cutscene that has Master Higgins dancing in some way with some other island creatures, with me having a huge grin on my face the entire time whenever any of these popped up.

However, if none of that sounds all too enticing for you, then at the end of the day, this is just another Adventure Island game. You run around throw things, eat things, and die to that octopus that you didn’t see coming until it is too late. You know how it goes at this point, and this game really doesn’t do anything new or original when compared to every other game before it. That doesn’t necessarily make the game bad at all, but at this point, we are four games in, and the lack of any prominent new features does kinda suck, and it does make it to where I can’t say this game is any better than that of Adventure Island II or even Super Adventure Island. A cute art style can only do so much for something like this before you start asking where all the new, cool shit is.

Overall, despite a major lack of change, and while it isn’t technically a remake at all, New Adventure Island manages to take most of what was wrong with the original game in this series and fixes it to where I ended up having a really great time with it, having the same basic, yet really fun gameplay at a reasonable length, coupled with an amount of charm that made this really enjoyable to admire as I was going along. I would definitely recommend it for those who fans of the previous games in the series, as well as those who didn’t like the original game like me, because while I can’t say for sure that you will like this one much more, you can definitely appreciate the effort put into making this into what is essentially a much better version of that original title. It’s also too bad that this was only released on the TurboGrafx 16, because I would kill to be able to play this game on modern platforms. Yeah, it did get re-released for the Virtual Console and PSN a while back… you know, before those services got shut down……… I hate video game companies so much.

Game #539

In that primordial placeless origin, through the mist-veil of time, since man first airbrushed Merlin smoking a pipe on the side of a van, there, you can feel it in the noosphere, a moon-lit dream, The Dream, a call in the heart of the human soul. Some have seen some small part of this dream- The Legend of Zelda, The Elder Scrolls, Ultima, Dark Souls, Adventure, Dragon Quest, King's Field, Wizardry, among innumerable others, nameless here forevermore, all have failed to reach The Dream. Perhaps cruel circumstance chained them to Earthly bond, perhaps cowardice stayed their hand, perhaps they lacked the naivety and earnestness necessary to behold a waking dream. Whatever their individual situation, the results have always been, like Lion of Gripsholm Castle, a mutant, an aberration, at best a passing resemblance. Dragon's Dogma is The Dream, forged in the furnace of the heart, it is not visually plain- it is clean, it is not halfbaked- it is too goodly to exist totally in a world half-evil, it achieves the promise of videogames, and proves that creative endeavour above all else is the greatest goal humanity can strive for. it is the twinkle in the eye of Merlin smoking a pipe airbrushed on the side of a van.

Reviewing this now since i will probably never beat this game.

As someone who as only very recently gotten into fighting games through the street fighter series, when i saw this at the thrift store for 15$ i figured why not give it a try. In the end i can say i can see why this game is so highly praised, especially when i consider when it came out. The graphics are absolutely incredible and though i am way worse at this than i am street fighter, the game-play has a sort of fluidity to it that is very hard to explain, you really just have to feel it for yourself. There are plenty of modes to play, in fact probably more than i ever will be able to play.

My personal problems with the game come with the inputs. While i think it is super cool that each character has such a wide range of moves, it is very, very difficult for me to remember which ones do what when i am playing as someone who only recently can just barely handle all the moves in street fighter. Still, this is just an issue with me and not really with the game.

Overall i think this game is excellent and probably one of the best multiplayer games on the playstation, though it can be a bit frustrating when I'm completely one-sidedly crushed by my friends who are somehow 10 000 000 times better at the game than me.

The Assassin’s Creed franchise has spent much of the past decade as one of the poster children of everything wrong with Triple-A gaming and because of that, it’s easy to forget just how bold and unique of a game the first Assassin’a Creed game was. Sure, parts of it are similar to games that came before — Tenchu, Prince of Persia, Thief, and even Sly Cooper are all obvious reference points — but the sum of those parts was unlike anything else at the time. There wasn’t exactly an abundance of historical/sci-fi open-world stealth-action games with a focus on parkour and social stealth, is all I’m saying. Assassin’s Creed was also one of the first true “next-gen” games of the 7th generation. It would’ve been close to impossible to do what this game did, at the scale it did, on 6th gen hardware.

All of that being said, how does the game actually play? Not great. It’s extremely rough around the edges, and there are a lot of edges here. Playing this game can feel a bit like you’re stuck in a Groundhog Day loop with the amount of times you’ll be doing the same copy-pasted missions over and over again. The combat never presents much of a challenge and doesn’t evolve much throughout the game, the AI is brain dead, and the modern day sections are by far the worst parts of the game.

Even if much of the actual moment-to-moment gameplay isn’t exactly good, there’s still quite a lot to like here. The Holy Land is lovingly detailed and can be a lot of fun to parkour around. The story is a bit of a mess, but Altaïr is a compelling protagonist with a good character arc. The parkour and social stealth are well implemented, and the music is really good. Assassin’s Creed was a big swing for Ubisoft, and while they didn’t hit it out of the park it provided an excellent concept to build on and plenty of potential to grow. For a time, its sequels began to live up to that potential, which makes it all the more disappointing when this series began wasting that potential.

dogshit

well maybe thats a bit too harsh but its insanely hard and BS

shrug

Dohna Dohna : A Colorful Ethical Paradox

AliceSoft is a company which always found itself in an interesting paradoxical crossroad when it comes to tackling heavy subject matter and putting it under the lens of morality. Being a eroge company and not the kind to half-ass the erotic side of their production like most Eroge seems to do out of convention (and for the most part to sell to a niche audience while bypassing censorship on more touchy subject matters) but embracing that aspect as part of their core identity puts them under a pretty unflattering light in the eyes of the general public. But AliceSoft being enjoyed mostly by a niche community of people on which its western side is the size of a small Italian mountain village means there’s not really any further or widespread discussions about the company and their works even within the fringe community of “Visual Novel fans” (I don’t like the etiquette but this is off-topic).

Usually the conversation ends as soon as it starts : AliceSoft is a porn game company, they make porn games for weirdoe otakus to jack-off to. And while we could end the discussion there, trying to be reasonable and actually explain why AliceSoft titles are more than the sum of is part is like explaining that there’s a difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia, like it exists, but it’s really hard to explain the subtle difference without sounding like a pedophile yourself and in the case of Alicesoft without sounding like a porn addicted weirdoe (which I absolutely am btw… anyway where was I ?).

And this is where yours truly chooses to bite the bullet and actually defend the idea that while being a porn game company, AliceSoft's entire existence is fascinatingly paradoxical. On one hand, Alicesoft is an eroge company and one that owns the mantle and wears it with pride, the people working at Alicesoft define themselves as “eroge makers” which can even be found on their logo and it’s not like they’re shy about it. In fact, Alicesoft has always been very transparent about their main goal when making these games : They love eroge and they want to make eroge and thus they put a sisyphean amount of effort into delivering on the erotic front, not because they wanted to sell to a niche market, not because they want to be edgy but because they genuinely enjoy and have a clear passions for the act of drawing naked women doing the deeds and then contextualize them within a thinly veiled plot with characters and complex gameplay systems to accompany said drawings.

Just one look at the Alice Mansion which is this super cool Dev Room feature present in almost every single of their titles will show you how transparent they are about that fact. They are a bunch of goofy hornballs that likes to make goofy lewd shit to please a crowd of people already averted to that type of writing or find an appeal in eroticism and pornography. Porn artists at the end of the day are still artists, they vibe with different shit, they bond over their weird quirky love for superficial details like girls in glasses and the “moe” side of their misery, there’s a lot of thought that’s put behind these elements and it’s impossible to remove that aspect of their catalog because it would just result in a different somewhat truncated experience.

So you think that something like this can only approached through an ironic lens and appreciated only by complete sociopath especially since a lot of the fetishes displayed in those games ranges from pretty extreme to downright criminal (may I remind the RanSill audience that our boy Rance isn’t an UWU soft boy but an honest to god criminal AND a rapist ?) but if it was that simple of course, the company wouldn’t have any sort of following.
Because on the other hand, Alicesoft also wants to tell good stories and more times than not, stories which actually challenge the view and the morals of the people they are trying to cater to. Being founded in the 80’s where most erotic game developers were making a quick bucks selling cheap strip poker, mahjong, shifumi or quizz games without much thought behind it, they wanted from the outset to create interesting scenarios, worlds and characters to contextualize the action. Suffice to say that in my opinion it serves the purpose of rendering the erotic situations even hotter, goofier and/or horrifying depending on what the games are aiming for and help them make more memorable in the long run because you end up having something to attach yourself to beyond the typical plumbers and stepmom scenarios.

And while that’s fine and all, I don’t think this exaggerated attention to detail and care alone would’ve made people stuck with series like Rance or their other less popular productions and they would’ve most likely died to the general indifference of many. As soon as Rance 1, the game present Rance as an awful criminal that you don’t and should not relate to or sympathize with in any capacity but that doesn’t change that he is the hero and he has to face adversaries and he alone isn’t what’s wrong with the world at large and that if people like Rance are able to exist and succeed within such a setting it’s mostly because of deeper problem with the way the world around him works, which in Rance 1 is portrayed by Lavender, the ghost of a girl who was killed by Lia, the princess of the Leazas Kingdom to quench her twisted desires and which Rance promptly punishes in his huh… own kind of way.

Very early on, AliceSoft was already toying the line between indulgence and the criticism of certain moral failings that may lead people to sincerely engage and create this type of content in the first place. Toushin Toushi 2 all the way back in 1994 did the whole “Sans Undertale judging you for your sins'' thing a lil bit more than 20 years before it was cool by including within its game mechanics a morality system which affected certain parameters in your games as well as changing the outcome of some scenes with a very obtuse way of absolving your sins if you so desired.

It’s a game where the protagonist is very different from Rance or even Kuma the character we’ll focus about in a bit, he’s a dude with a girlfriend who sadly finds himself in a pretty shitty situation regarding her well-being and his own deeper desire to progress that relationship to the next level followed by a second half so brilliant and so thought provoking that I really don’t want to spoil it for you or analyze it in details here (maybe some other day ?). Suffice to say that a morality system works with the type of story TT2 wants to tell but the nature of the game being an eroge and thus feeling the need to cater to an audience who genuinely enjoys and likes that type of content is a bit of an awkward position to find yourselves in.

Mind you, I think part of the reason this came to come through for the most part is because Alicesoft is pretty mixed in terms of gender ratio within the company, and a lot of the hard hitting and brutal scenes from these games were written by a female writer by the name of Torii who did her damn best to add her personal female leaning vision in the core DNA of these burly sex stories mostly consumed by a male audience, to the point that the modern western Rance fandom is surprisingly left-leaning and feminist at their core because they could pick apart the more subtle thinly veiled themes that these games had to offer.
In fact, when Torii doesn’t work on a game, you can instantly feel it in the level of indulgence and a lack of subtlety in regards to thing she had previously installed like that cynical biting edge that comes through when shouting into the void that the world is complex and the winds of change can come from the most unlikely and at times unlikable people. I’ve already talked about this in my review on Rance IX if you care enough to check it and give you a proper idea of what I think Rance under a new author might look and sound like (spoiler : I’m mixed on a lot of narrative choices in that game despite enjoying it in the end) but that’s not why I wrote this lengthy introduction.

I wanted to show you that deeply, Alicesoft never forgot about consequences, they may be fetishizing stuff like sexual assault and everything but it’s only a filter through which they can tell stories about the deeper implications of said actions and the multiple consequences that can be born from them and how people explore their own insecurities about sex while still keeping a mostly fun and lighthearted tone to disorientated the distracted players. Kichikuou Rance, one of their most popular and widely acclaimed titles is a game entirely built on a push and pull gameplay loop based on facing the consequences of your actions, making tough decisions and having to adapt to them and accept them as they come. And while a lot of this was lost after Torii’s departure from the company, I believe one writer took the mantle of what she once wanted to accomplish with her works, and that writer is known as Dice Korogashi.

Dice Korogashi was part of a newly formed team of developers at Alicesoft that I will now refer to as “Team Dohna” for the sake of simplicity. When the question of remaking Rance 01 for a modern audience was brought up by TADA who initially wasn’t fond of the idea. He thought that if it had to happen it should be done under the same condition the original game was made in : by a fresh team of young developers, a risky bet for what will eventually become the newest best entry point into the series but a bet that paid off significantly in the end, since Rance 01 is considered by many as one of the best titles in the series and the other remake they worked on, Rance 03 saw even more praise by the general public which faith were starting to dwindle during the few dry years of the company after the release of Sengoku Rance.

Dice and team Dohna perfectly captured the feeling of the franchise and what made it work in the first place, and with a material as shallow and honestly not that great as Rance 1 they managed to pull a lot of its best quality while reinventing the game for a new audience, coupled with a lot of retroactive continuity stuff, a more fleshed out adventure and generally better more witty writing which reminded people of the good days where Torii was at the office.

It is no surprise then than Dice was brought onto Rance X to take the role of main writer replacing Yoroide Dragon who only served a minor co-writing role this time around, the guy understood his stuff and Team Dohna were perhaps even more passionate and talented than their mentors when it came to making fun games which pleased a grand majority of people.

Soon, Team Dohna will start working on their own original IP, a game that will shake the world with a stunning artstyle and a level of presentation never seen before for the company.
Is it all style and no substance ? Or is there more to it ? Let’s see for ourselves.
Dohna Dohna was originally announced in 2016 and went onto a long development period of 4 years after its announcement after the scope and technical aspect of the project found itself to be too big for Alicesoft and Team Dohna to handle in a timely manner especially with the addition of guest artist joining the fray to design all of the unique heroines of the game and of course COVID, anyway the game was eventually released in 2020 to celebrate 1 year too late the 30th anniversary of the company. It wasn’t director Ittenchiroku first title within the universe as there exist a sort of prototype of Dohna Dohna called Haruurare which was a small mini-game in the Alice 2010 compilation, although no english version of it is available, the main premise is roughly similar with an heavy emphasis on kidnapping and forcing girls into prostitution which is what Dohna Dohna is mostly (but not entirely, we’ll get there) about.

The game takes place in the fictitious Asougi City, a modern Japanese metropole controlled by a big corporate conglomerate called “Asougi” who managed to claim its independence from the rest of world and establish a sort of cult of personality fascist regime with all the bells and whistles that come along with it such an heavily armed police force, propaganda everywhere, surveillance, “cleaning” drones and forced labor for anyone who steps too out of line with the system in place. To oppose the oppressive regime a couple of gangs whose goal is to trample on the establishment were founded, these gangs known as “Anti-Asou” clan engage in illegal activities such as property damage, stealing but most importantly the dangerous business of “hustling” which can be roughly translated by the act of kidnapping innocent women and selling their bodies to illegal prostitution.

You take control of Kuma, member of an anti-Aso clan by the name of “Nayuta” and the one managing the hustling business. he’s accompanied by other members such as Zappa the clan’s leader, Torataro the milf enjoyer, KiraKira your chainsaw wielding gyaru childhood friend, Porno the hypersexual loli and a slew of colorful characters joining the party as you progress through the game. Your goal on top of following the story is going to go inside various dungeons in order to “hunt” for potential new “talents” , bring them to your hideout and “train” them to perform well and bring you lots of cash during the “hustling” hours.

Let’s get something out of the way first before going in detail about this very peculiar premise. The game is absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, it’s something that many people, even those of the mainstream gaming sphere who don't know about the concept behind the game have said. I would go as far as to say that out of all of Alicesoft’s 30 year old catalog of great games, this one easily has the best presentation of them all. Alicesoft being an eroge company means that they are of a relatively humble size and their games are relatively low budget compared to even low-profile indie games and thus are mostly carried by their sprite art and CG’s as it is tradition in that field. But here the game is just fucking popping, the illustrator Gyokai did more than an amazing job giving life to this game, the colours are flashy in a certain pop-way, the character design are ultra solid and most of all, the game has actual battle animation and those wouldn’t have to envy those of productions commonly found on Steam.

Many people say that Dohna Dohna feels like the “Persona 5” of Eroge and from an aesthetic perspective, it’s hard to deny, everything is so fluid, the UI is really nice, it feels like a proper professional game release and is far above the standards of these kinds of production, as far as the art go, the game is freaking gorgeous and I personally love it ! Even the H-Scenes are… well not to be a gooner but the art pops even in those.
One quick look at the Alice Mansion section of the game informs us that the team went for this sort of Hip-Hop, World End With You artstyle because they felt that telling a story in a modern city would make the visuals of the game rather dull and they wanted to contrast with the heavier subject matter of the game and that was a more than excellent choice, in fact I would even dare to say that some of the more… let’s say harsher and hardcore scene wouldn’t work nearly as well with an artstyle less detailed and with less flair, I gotta admit that I rarely praise H-Scenes but some of the H-Scenes in this game really made me stop to take care of important business if you know what I’m saying.

When I said earlier that the game was considered to be the “Persona 5” of Eroge, I also meant it a bit more literally as a lot of the main criticism people have towards the game because of this poppy artstyle combined to quite a dark premise meant the game was supposedly all style and no substance, that it’s just a fun game with fun mechanics and that the stories failed at delivering any thoughtful deeper commentary about the subject matter it was trying to tackle, I must admit, that was a bit of my impression at first. Like I said, it’s really hard to release an Eroge who very obviously indulges in some crass stuff while trying to sell and please to an audience of jerkers who are only there to appreciate the “art” and the game general tone didn’t really indicate at first that the story was going to take that whole “hustling” thing all that seriously and put it as an excuse to be primordially fun first and a bit needlessly edgy second. I was actually wary about this throughout my playthrough but then I remember that the person who recommended this game to me had a lot to say positively about the game’s handling of said topic and the deeper political themes the game tries to explore.

But to talk about these, we first need to understand how the game works. The game is divided in multiple phases, you have a hideout phase where you can buy items, manage your party, participate in character events to further your relationship with your party members and manage your “talents” (more on that later). After that, you have two choices, either spend the day “hustling” which will trigger the Hustling phase of the game or go on a “hunt” which initiates the Hunting Phase of the game AKA Dungeon exploration. We’ll focus on the hunting phases first as it is the more “video gamey” aspect of the game.

After selecting a dungeon, you move your characters on a series of linear branching paths which sometimes leads to an icon triggering a fight, giving you an item or triggering an event. The battle system of the game is actually pretty fun, it’s a less hardcore version of “Darkest Dungeon”, if you ever played that game, your characters and the opposite party are placed in a round of 4 and you have to slide them left or right before using their abilities, you have to consider placement because some of your abilities only work within a certain radius or only hit a certain row (which can be seen by a line connecting to where the attack will land) and also to avoid damages yourself, as some of the more fragile units could potentially get killed easily if they’re misplaced. While Dohna Dohna, doesn’t really have the same level of complexity of Darkest Dungeons with its permadeath system and various amounts of status effects (here most of them are just stats debuffs), it does have a few “puzzle” fights when it comes to recruiting talents ! Sometimes when on the field, you’ll hit a case with a girl icon, this triggers a fight with a talent on it and if you want to recruit it, you will need to defeat that girl last and so you need to time and use your techniques right as to clear all enemies before dealing with the talent who always die in one hit ! It’s a nice change of pace on top of the bosses which are also pretty damn fun and well designed.
The game’s difficulty on a first playthrough is “just right” and the character variety of your party is pretty damn solid, it’s also nice that you can swap party members at any time in battle and an unlimited amount of time to as to keep the general flow of battle intact and not punish the players too much for harsh decisions. Fights are usually not all that hard but there were some that took me by surprises with how challenging they were, combined with the entire resource management aspect of dungeon exploration. I have a few complaints with the game's systems however : for one, only the active party members at the end of a battle get any XP which is pretty annoying to keep everyone evenly leveled by the end of the game and two the enemy variety isn’t super high. I understand this was done because animating hand drawn sprites for every characters probably was already a huge time commitment as is but It wouldn’t have killed to at least have swap colored version with different aptitudes instead of just pulling from the same pool of generic soldier troopers with more HP for new zones, that’s no to say it’s always these types of enemies as some story dungeons switch things up when the other gangs are involved but still.

Another thing that I didn’t really enjoy was the weapon upgrade system, for some reasons, Alicesoft weapon systems have always been obtuse and RNG heavy for no reasons and Dohna Dohna is no exception. To get new gear, you need to first find the material and then buy it at the shop, problem is the game doesn’t tell you where to find these past Rank 2 and even if you figure it out somehow, you need to be lucky to be able to find said material in a dungeon during an hunting phase, it makes the endgame unnecessarily grindy if you want the most optimal gear to tackle the last few challenges of the game unless you want to spend a lifetime killing one tanky enemies in one of the late game areas while making sure they don’t send your ass to the shadow realm.

Speaking of buying items, the main means of collecting money in this game is through the “hustling” part which is where the game hides its true ludo-narrative experience. One thing that I’ve noticed when playing through the game is that this aspect of the game was pretty secondary, you need it to gain money and gain more resources but aside from the time the story requires it, the hustling is something almost entirely optional and even when you are forced to interact with it the requirement to progress to the next stage of the story is usually not that high.

At first, I thought this design decision was a bit odd. Why would the secondary mechanic of the game, arguably the one the marketing of the game was centered around and one of the main sources of inner conflict for our protagonist, be left being so optional ? The main answer one could arrive at is that much like the RPG aspect of the game, they wanted this part to not be too much of a weight on the players, especially the ones that were more familiar with RPG mechanics but not nearly enough with management simulators. After all, the Alice Mansion section of the game talks about how they wanted the game to remain easy and accessible in order to sell it to a larger audience as this big bright and colorful game celebrating 30 years of the company’s history.

But by actually investing myself deeper within that part of the game out of my own volition and also mostly so I could gather enough resources to mitigate the end-game grind, I think that I was understanding why they decided to do it this way as it says a lot about you the player and how you start naturally fitting in the shoes of the main character Kuma, experiencing a similar level of cold detachment as you invest more time in those mechanics.

Kuma is an interesting protagonist as far as the wider range of Alicesoft protagonist goes, unlike Rance he isn’t some lust and ego-driven asshole looking to dominate the screen time and the world while hiding his weaker side behind a veil of macho man behavior, unlike Seed from Toushin Toshi II, he isn’t an innocent constantly struggling with the morality of his actions and the vow he gave to his S.O. Kuma is a bit like Walter White from the Breaking Bad series, a man who after losing everything turns himself to a shady business and has grown colder and more indifferent in order to protect his own psyche from the harsh reality of the acts he’s committing. Kuma lost his family after they were used as experiments for Asougi which led him to a life of crime and joining the Nayuta clan. Nayuta, initially wasn’t fond of “hustling” as a business but Kuma began introducing it to the clan under the suggestion of “Mistress” a shop owner who gives out weapons and items to other clans around the city as “hustling” is shown to him to be the most optimal way to found Nayuta’s illegal and revolutionary activities.

Kuma sees hustling as just a means to an end, just something that he absolutely needs and has to do in order to avenge his family and further his goals within Nayuta. Kuma is a young man, still going to school during the events of the story even if his presence in class isn’t the most consistent, he even embarks his childhood friend KiraKira into that business which he probably didn’t want to do in the first place but much like anything in his life, dealing with a life of crime had terrible effects on his mind. Kuma being responsible for such a business had to grow distant and cold when dealing with “talents” and usually, he wants to deal with the hustling alone, not letting the other members of Nayuta handle that side of the clan activities and only focusing on the hunt. Of course, the other members interact with him throughout the course of the game, but they don’t really question him on that subject for more than a few seconds and it’s only when Kuma is gone from the team for a short while during the campaign that another member by the name of Joker takes the mantle temporarily and say something “well that was fucked up” and not much else.

As the story progresses, Kuma kinda loses himself in his job, leaving aside his humanity in order to perform well and grow the numbers even larger, he lost himself in the sauce and it’s not even sure that he could even escape from it, he’s not even sure of why he was doing in the first place and why he’s continuing. This is why the hustling part of the game is very light and not too player demanding in my opinion, just like Kuma, you can just treat it literally like a side-hustle that you need to participate in even a little bit to progress in the game but if you want to perform better, you need more money, you need more numbers, you need better talents, with better stats and thus any further implication within that side of the game is only greed from the players perpetuating the cycle of violence and cruelty for his gains.

In the game, you manage your talents through the uses of a tablet showing different stats like their looks (how likely they’ll get picked up by clients), their techniques (how much money they’ll bring) and their mental health stat which is akin to HP in other game and when that reaches zero, the talent “breaks” and thus cannot perform as well and is a wasted asset that you need to dispose of. Talents also comes with a series of attributes which give bonuses during hustling for example by giving a “sexy” talent to a client that demands it means you’ll get more money out of them but in return they can also add attributes to them some beneficial and some not like making them blind or disabled, these attributes have different effects on the talent stat growth and stat decrease every time they participate in sexual activities with mental health almost always systematically dropping down each time.

Of course in order to keep your talent in check, you can feed them different training items which increases their stats so they can either perform better and for longer, you also need to make sure they stay on the pill so they don’t end up getting pregnant which is about as bad as them being broken and making them discardable. It’s in this aspect that I found my mind was starting to look at these talents like just replaceable assets, things that you can just break and replace by the next talent with better stats and initially, the game actually encourages such a playstyle because it’s more efficient to discard your broken talent and replacing them with newer, better ones than keeping them for too long.

This is encouraged by something called the “Hustle Appreciation/Desperation Day” : while you can hustle at any point during your playthrough, it is preferable to keep your girls for these special day which give more money and dedicate the other days to hunting in dungeons and progressing the story. Desperation day in particular is pretty good for your wallet, as the clients give way more money per hustle but in exchange sadly are rougher with your talents which reduce your talents mental health to mush, faster than it took me to write this review and give them a lot of bad attributes !

Realizing the reality of this situation, I started trying to invest more in my talents mental health, showering them with goods to boost their moods and I realized that it was kind of harder to do than just discard them but I didn’t wanna lose some of my best talents as they were a great asset to my business and I grew attached to them. It’s upon this realization that something clicked in my head, I asked the friend who recommended the game to me about tips on how to get more mental health items to keep my talents happy and not leaving them to which they responded that “Yes indeed, it is hard to take care of their mental health, but think about it, isn’t it worse to feed them lies in order to cope with their situation ? It’s not really ethically better to subject them to continuous trauma like that instead of letting them go” and suddenly it clicked, the true horrors of hustling were coming to me. I didn’t treat these poor women as people, I treated these poor women as assets…

I was turning into Kuma, colder, harsher, more disinterested, only caring about the well-being of my talents because I profited off of their pain. I thought that I was mitigating their suffering but truly, I wasn’t. Every Time one of my “talent” mental health started dropping, I was afraid to lose those I called “My best earner” (or “bottom bitch” like that one South Park episode about Butters turning into a pimp). And the complete irony of my line of thinking was put right in front of me when the last tier of mental health training item was literally making my “talents” read the fucking “Myth of Sissyphus” which is a touch of humor on behalves the developers but made me realized how much of an ass I really was when it comes to understanding what the game wanted to say. I was feeding these girls lies to make them feel like their work here was not as bad as it actually was and in the middle of all this, I forgot that this was a game about kidnapping innocent bystanders and forcing them into a life of trauma.

And the downward spiral of awful shit that I was committing naturally without question didn’t stop there. See in this game, there are “special talents” that you can recruit after passing certain points in the story. They usually come with better stats and a unique design provided by the many guest artists who worked on the game but that’s not all. Because these are unique heroines, they have stories attached to them that you can experience by unlocking events by meeting certain conditions, usually involving hustling them to specific people.
When this happens, an ero-scene plays, with a CG and everything and it’s there that the horrors buried deep inside this colorful game starts to show themselves in a much more “in your face” kind of way. See, one of the most interesting narrative decision when it comes to the game story is that the game is told only through dialogues, it’s not an unusual style for Alicesoft of course but the absence of 3rd person narration during the story was purposefully done as to not to embellish or hide the intents of the characters during the regular story sections. Every thought and every action that Kuma or other characters take or have is presented bluntly to you without flourish as to keep the flow of the story intact and the intent of the narrative clear with the exception of two cases scenarios : The Unique Heroine Ero-Events and the “humiliation” scenes that I’ll cover later down this essay.

Here the narration flips the POV from the players, to the victims depicted in the scene because let’s not mince any words, these are harsh, sexual assault scene and the “talents” that you set to the gutter are victims in this specific scenario. During these moments, you can clearly, hear, see and read every deeper thoughts of the story at large, heck one of the CG’s in the game also happens to be in first person view, giving you a frontal look at what it means to be in these people's shoes. Notice how I said “people” and “victims” and not “talent” here because in these circumstances, with the absence of the filters provided by the fluid UI and gameplay mechanics, you can only perceive them as human beings, being progressively destroyed by your actions. You could’ve avoided this, you could’ve just ignored the event requirements for these heroines, but you likely did so out of morbid curiosity or an empty goal minded interest in completing the game CG collection and now you are granted with your “reward” which is these intensely hardcore scenes of psychologically horrific abuse.

There are over 13 unique heroines that are this way and what I do actually enjoy about them is that while their fate is equally as horrible for each, they’re all on a different spot on the spectrum of trauma. Some girls, who lived in Asougi city, who believed in the good of the people living there and the system working for their own benefits, suddenly saw their entire world crumble in front of their eyes. Some of them, whose regular lives were already not enviable before you kidnapped them, see this activity as an escape from the far harsher reality that awaits them in the outside world as being sent to prostitution is marginally better than their previous life. Some of them, who never received or understood the concept of love and are receiving praises for the first time, finally feel values in this body of work. Some of them revel in this situation, as they were already inclined to work with you even if you didn’t force them too.

You might even think that some girl’s situation is “not that bad” until it becomes worse. One of the girls is a pompom girl who gets specifically requested by her childhood friend on behalf of his father buying a prostitute for him to lose her virginity. But after the sighs of relief from realizing that she only has to deal with someone she knows and can trust, it’s immediately followed by the second event where the guy breaks that trust to get out of a bad situation by offering her to his bullies. Feeling guilt over this fact, he starts menacing Kuma, who responds with a cold demeanor that he chose this, that he has his information and that if he attempted to do anything against him, he will expose him and that he need to find another solution and the best solution was simply to buy off the girl to be his private property, removing her freedom for good, just to be the one exclusive to her and give himself a good conscience.

Just like every road leads to Rome, the fate of these girls all end up in the deepest, darkest, places regardless of their circumstances or if they find new meaning in this wretched parody of what they call “their new life”. Whether you keep them around for longer because you wanna keep using their good stats to further your gain, or tire them until they can’t move and break them to replace them with others, in the end, you are always in the wrong, you are always doing bad things ! Your eyes were bigger than your stomach, you can and should’ve avoided this, you could’ve just participated “a little” but you went all in and even then you still participated anyway. Because while these heroines could express themselves directly to you as they were designed as such by the game, how about the slew of generic, interchangeable NPC talents that you sent to the gutter ? You probably only saw them as numbers on a tablet and nothing else.

This is what it means to be Kuma, this is what it means to lose yourself in something that you can’t control anymore. In the end, you’re no better than him, in the end the game molded you into what he become and it’s in this moment that you realize that much like Joker when Kuma leaves the party that the reality of hustling is much more fucked up and that you could probably never do it yourself and yet you did !

There are also other observations one could make of such a system, like how the game seems to privilege younger looking characters when it comes to distributing the beauty stat (with the more child-like ones systematically being S-tier and in high demand) or the fact that talking to your talents is yet another, pointless attempt at trying to sympathize with the victim of your crime and all of this starts to paint an interesting ludo-narrative tapestry that viciously hits where it needs to.

But see, this is where my praise for the game kinda comes to an end, because, the thing that is unfortunate about Dohna Dohna, is that this “style over substance” reputation isn’t entirely invented out of the blue. A lot of the systems that I did mention are secondary and we did see how it was an intentional choice but the problem is that the game expects you to play it in a certain way in order to get the most juice out of what it’s trying to do and this way is pretty counter-intuitive. I guess I haven’t talked about the main story but it’s because my thoughts on it are a bit of a mix bag. I think the cast is charming and the writing can be funny at times and yes, sometimes it can be thoughtful but it feels like it spectacularly ignores all of the narrative potential of the story told by the hustling mechanics.

It’s like Dohna Dohna is two facet of a coin, on the surface, if you play normally and doing the minimum to progress through the game, you realize that the story is a bit of standard and not that entertaining gang-war story with tints of themes of revolution and fighting against oppression, you’ve likely stories like these before and you’ve likely seen them done better. Heck, the game actually has heroines that are not tied to the hustling mechanic but are regular party members and the way the game writes and treats them is a bit… strange ?

When doing a regular playthrough of Dohna Dohna, you can participate in events with your party members to get closer to them and gather affinity points, they’ve become quite popular in JRPG’s these days but this mechanic took its origin from the dating sim genre to which Dohna Dohna is clearly a derivative of. Because this is an eroge, most of the events are for the most part erotic but in the end they all serve the purpose of getting Kuma closer to the girls and the rest of the gang and getting to know them better.

These are called “feelings” event and they’re all sorts of your typical romantic, weird and wacky sex scenario that you come to see from your average eroge with the character arc of said characters usually involving them discovering what sex is and the joy of having healthy regular intercourse with a respectful partner (who just happens to be a freaking criminal on the verge of psychopathy) and eventually falling in love with them or something. Of course, I am vastly exaggerating and there is some variation and some more complex arcs thrown in there but it’s in these moments that the game drops any pretends of being a deep commentary on the commodification of abuse, the cycle of violence and a character study on the fall of a broken man to dive head first into the typical kind of indulgent content meant to titillate the player’s noodlestick.

Combined with the main story itself barely acknowledging the hustling part of the game as an afterthought and you get quite a strange whiplash that might confirm initial expectations. It’s also not helped that the story itself doesn’t really care to explore a bit more deeply the conflicts that exist within its settings. There are 2 other clans that confronts you during the game, they are also Anti-Aso, also participate in similar shady business that you sometimes get to see but most often not but they never really expand on why these gangs who seemingly aiming for the same goal of taking down Asougi don’t actually work together. Is it because they have other methods that don’t fit with Nayuta’s mindset, or they’re using means that they don’t agree with ? It seems like the only reason these gangs fight each other is because it’s traditionally what happens in these types of stories instead of some more deeply rooted reasons.

This sadly has the unfortunate result of making the story go around in circle, never really progressing from hours on end and hinging on similarly repeated conflicts to create intrigues, drama and tension and while it can be entertaining and sometimes fun thanks to the writing being charming, it’s far too shallow to be able to tell an impactful story through the main mean in which the game communicates with you which are the characters, their dialogues and interactions. While there’s definitely some moments, they’re not really reflective of the main conflicts that exist within the world and what our characters are led to do in order to survive in it. The game does try to mitigate this by some neat twist near the end of the game, where it is revealed that in order to maintain the illusion of peace within its system, it had to create, manage and control the Anti-Aso clans from the shadow, manipulating them in order to create a criminal underworld where the more “problematic” citizens can give in to their deeper twisted desires. This reveal should’ve shook Kuma to his core especially when it turns out that Mistress, the shopkeep who led him to this life of crime in the first place, worked in tandem with Asougi’s CEO to maintain this masquerade.

During the final moments of the game, there’s a betrayal arc that ends as soon as it starts because of some friendship speech, there’s a big team-up of all the Anti-Aso clans working together and they try to attack and dethrone the wretched capitalist overlord and their big giant robot of doom. This ending while conceptually interesting concludes in a bit of a wet fart in my opinion, with the characters triumphantly exposing Asougi’s crime to the general public without actually dismantling the company and their influences and most importantly, without facing any real consequences for their action. It was in this moment that Kuma should’ve been punished for his crimes, and face his ultimate fate after realizing that all he did was for nothing and he can only bear guilt on his conscience for the rest of his life or face death but there’s none of that shit and it kinda throw me off a little bit.

You can definitely feel that perhaps, Team Dohna was planning to continue the story and expand on its world, characters and conflicts in a sequel and the multiple endings of the game is definitely opened to it, but with Team Dohna leaving Alicesoft to move on to greener pastures and Dohna Dohna being one of the last high profile games of their catalog that isn’t an exploitative gacha mobile game, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

And it’s a shame because this story in all of its classicism and in all of its shortcoming and lack of completeness and ludo-narrative consistency is the Dohna Dohna that most people who didn’t push the game further than the credits and the basic requirement to progress through the game will experience and it’s a fun story don’t get me wrong ! But, I wouldn’t blame anyone for getting out of Dohna Dohna feeling unsatisfied by its promising premise that ends up being nothing more than a gimmick at first glance !

The thing is that the game has a very counter-intuitive way to push you towards a deeper, more impactful experience which hinges on you being bad at the game. See, when I’ve talked about the heroine's events earlier, I didn’t mention that all of these feeling events have a “variant B” to them which completely flips the script on its head to deliver on some hard hitting confrontation of Kuma’s action and their consequences. To access these alternate events, you have to not participate in any events with the girl (and thus not furthering their relationship and rendering them less useful in battle) until a certain point in the scenario where they get kidnapped. If you fail to save them in a reasonable amount of time, you will witness something called an “humiliation scene” which is, you guessed it, them getting treated similarly to how the unique heroine in the hustling mode gets. While it does offer another H-Scene to complete your gallery, the deeper, long-lasting effect however is changing every subsequent “feeling events” you’ll do with them to have additional dialogues to reflect the traumatic events they went through !

This is a brilliant idea on paper, most of these variant B scenes are actually miles more interesting conceptually than their regular counterparts. One of them is literally Antenna, the goofy autistic hacker girl having some sort of an existential crisis when she realizes that Kuma might actually be as much of a monster as her aggressor and Kuma retorquing that it’s indeed true and that he doesn’t want to feed her lies by pretending the contrary. Or KiraKira trying to convince Kuma from stopping all this madness and trying to go back to a regular school-life as girlfriend and boyfriend with Kuma sadly refusing as he is in too deep to back down no matter how irrational it may be and how uncomfortable it makes KiraKira.

I say on paper, because, getting to the conclusion that the heroines are “more interesting with traumas than without” is a bit of an awkward statement to make as factually true as it may be. Some of them like Porno and Medico, still have solid enough arc regularly especially Porno since her relationship to Kuma is deeply tied to her troubled past and how she’s learning to cope with it in a very unhealthy way but for the grand majority, you’re better off reaching for the heroine bad endings, if you want the game’s tone to fit the harsh subject matters brought up by its gameplay mechanics and Kuma’s inner conflict. It’s also just kind of badly handled in execution, the requirements to even access these bad endings are so specific, and so hard to miss due to the game treating them as punishments for not playing the game right that it kinda misses the point and is where it would’ve helped if the game was just a tad bit more challenging and tad bit less forgiving when it comes to managing your time and your ressources.

Because as it stands, these bad ending variants feel like rewards rather than punishment because you need to actively seek them in order to make the story more engaging and the point the story wants to get at clearer. And unlike Rance IX, where its bad endings were kind of pointlessly edgy to please to a certain demographic without any meaningful addiction to the game story and what it wanted to accomplish, here you’ll actually want to get to them because otherwise, you just end up with a shallower experience and less completion percentage on your save file.

And isn’t it all a bit ass-backward ?

By treating that side of the game as just an optional, easily missable part of the experience, you ultimately sabotage the potential the story could’ve had in the long run and I don’t think that as it stands, Dohna Dohna can hold its ground naturally as a great entry in Alicesoft’s catalog without these pointless detour. But on the other hand, Alicesoft loves their replay value and also loves their generosity and providing their players with tons of contents to satisfy their craving for erotic gaming.

This is where the philosophical dilemma lies with Alicesoft production and more specifically with Dohna Dohna. It’s clear that the reason all of the story’s depth lied semi-hidden behind obtuse condition was only made this way to turn that darker side of the game into something that players are actively seeking and while the scenes in question can be very heavy in terms of atmosphere and content, I’m not a fool to suggest that to some people, these scenes actually feels like a reward regardless of the writers best effort to accomplish the contrary. Because of the way the game leads the player to that content but also because simply, some folks are just “into that shit” and there’s nothing we can really do about that unless turning the game into a family friendly RPG where these subject matters could barely even be brought up in the first place.

But for those who can set aside their fantasies to read between the lines and really absorbing where the game is trying to lead them, they will certainly find what they were looking for story-wise and learn a valuable lesson with this cautionary tale of a broken man, breaking a lot of woman in his path for what he believed was the right thing to do in order to survive and overthrow the system. Alas, I also hoped that the actual main storyline supported that line of thinking.

As a man in my mid-20’s playing eroge I can only admire and scrutinize the story from a media analyst perspective. I can also empathize with the subject matter and the characters interacting with it and also enjoy the game for simply being a fun game to pass the time. Unfortunately, I could never entirely relate to the pleas and the struggles of these victims because I am not one myself and thus perhaps my review might be just as shallow and disinterested as the story itself was to its deeper narrative elements.

With that out of the way however, I think that while Dohna Dohna is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, I still think it’s one of Alicesoft strongest title and that while the attempt was a bit messy, I can only appreciate that they’ve tried and create a story that might connect to someone out there who will find more value in it that I have. However I have one last thing to share before finishing up this essay.

I’ve mentioned countless times during this review that the game was recommended to me by a certain person that I had yet to mention : My good friend Kitty, mostly known by its pen-name of “Antenna” or “.Farside”. if my review made you curious about the game or if you simply want a more thorough and engaged analysis of the work by someone with more insight on it as it unfortunately has a first-hand experience with the subject matter and felt deeply touched by it, you can check what its article on the game has to say about the game here :

https://fuwanovel.net/2023/08/why-dohna-dohna-matters/

I highly recommend it personally, it’s better written than anything I could come up with myself and I consider this to be an essential companion piece to a first hand experience with the game.

mesmo sendo curtinho, continua muito bom e divertido. acho que um dos meus fav do spider man.

how the fuck is this not an adaptation of a cheesy 80s flick?!?

White man has been here? How can you tell? show white people going loco oh wow they really amped up the drama hihihi, ok can you just follow me sir. I don't bite but they do. With one of the most bankruptely creative name in the industry yet, Dead Rising offers a painfully accurate american outbreak with all its quirks. It doesn't even feel that junk in retrospect... Oh i'm soooo lying that AI came out the wazzoo. Does it make some situations more memorable? Also yes, that's one of our realities. Holding hands has reached astronomical tediousness levels.

It's an interesting branch of roguelites. We could even call it a management sim the way you're gonna rewind that clock over and over in an attempt to maximize your PP, hard pause on that one but I done forgor what the letters stood for, I'll go ahead and make this up it means "Cock n' Ball Torture" there, no one's batting an eye because one knows what this game's really about. I'm getting that PP up when some woman zombie is munching on my private parts or when I'm taking a photo of a woman zombie munching on someone's private parts. A serious main story and the silliness we're subjected to outside of it is exactly the Yakuza brand, it's something the japanese really know how to do. They be knowin their silliness frfr.

I'm not even gonna discuss that main story, it's serviceable and survivors ratio + cope seethe. I don't know if survivors really is a good way to put it, they aren't surviving shit until the West comes along. And here I am changing into sneakers wearing a dress that would turn me into the belle of the bal, I'm built different they cannot mimic a fraction of my power. I can eat bullets no problem, chainsaws are a different issue but it's because West is wooden hard baby

To the people who played Zelda: Breath of the Wild and thought "I really wish this had traditional dungeons", go and play this game. That is right, Star Fox Adventures is just a Zelda game with a Star Fox skin, but this time almost every level is designed like a Zelda dungeon. Too much Zelda dungeon if I may.

I picked this game up back in the day at full price fully excited to give this a try. I was kinda expecting an action game where you get to play Fox on foot as I always wanted to do that in Star Fox 64's singleplayer. I played through the first hour and never touched it again as it was not at all what I was expecting. Fox only has a staff? It's more of an adventure game than action? Damn, I just wanted to run around a dinosaur planet as Fox and shoot things. And it went up there with one of the most disappointing purchases I had saved up for with my allowance.

20 years later, I gave Star Fox 64 another try and found it to be one of my favorite games of all time. With that, and playing pretty much all of the Zelda games during the pandemic, I became both a massive Zelda and Star Fox fan. Having remembered Star Fox Adventures was just a marriage of those two franchises, I was more than willing to revisit this one.

Now I won't get into the Dinosaur Planet details, because it's pretty much a known fact by everyone that Star Fox Adventures was meant to be another IP, but Nintendo forced Rare to slap the Star Fox IP on this. With playing this game you could clearly see that.

The story here is really basic and not at all intriguing like a Zelda game, you're just saving a planet from an evil general. Collect X amount of thingamaobs and defeat the final boss. Pretty straightforward. You can tell all the "Star Fox" aspects of the story were stiched on. All the important characters you'd expect to see from a Star Fox game is either put to the sidelines as an excuse for the UI, or they are left out until the end of the game. Most of the characters that are in the limelight are fox himself and the uninteresting dinosaur races you meet.

Considering Star Fox was a shooter prior to this, you'd expect this game to have some decent action. This cannot be further from the truth as somehow the combat is so barebones, it makes Ocarina of Time's combat look like Dark Souls. There will only be 2 or 3 enemy types you will be facing in the whole game and they all die with the same strategy, going up to them and mashing the A button. With that said, there's only like 3 bossfights here too, which aren't even that good. That's 2 for 2 so far where Zelda mogs this game in both Combat and Bosses.

Where the game's main strength is the level design and puzzles. As previously mentioned, the best way to describe the structure of this game is that you're playing dungeon after dungeon with sometimes having an on-rails shooter in between. But there is too much dungeon here. The good thing is that the puzzle design is great and not once did I have to ever look up a guide. At the same time, nothing was too simple that it felt like it was easy.

One of the really sinful things this game does is the amount of backtracking. Now I know backtracking is a thing in these type of adventure games, but I never thought about how painful the backtracking once when playing a Zelda or Metroid game for example. Here, you are forced to go through every section you've already been through twice, sometimes even 3 times. This is including some dungeons you need to backtrack to. This singlehandedly kills so much of the pacing and enjoyment of this game, it is probably my biggest gripe that prevents me from calling this a great game.

There are also little nitpicky things like the aiming segments not controlling well. The on-rails shooter segments not being as nearly as good as Star Fox 64. The annoying little dinosaur companion that you need to keep finding mushrooms to feed it. A lot of tiny aspects hold this game from being the great singleplayer adventure it could've been.

It's still a good game and worth playing through once if you enjoy Zelda dungeon design. But if you had a GameCube and had to decide between this or Wind Waker, I would play the Wind Waker a hundred times over.

I have starred at a blank screen for several minutes trying to think of what to say to show my love for this game. Unfortunately trying to describe exactly what makes me feel the way I do about this game is hard to pinpoint without just saying this is a masterpiece that excels in every area a video games can. But in my opinion this truly excels at every level. Character progression, relate ability, replay ability, story, production, sound tracks, visuals, combat, exploration, vast hour syncing beautiful locations, heart breaking emotional moments, genuinely hilarious moments, so many fun mini games that it feels like you could sell it’s as a Final Fantasy version of Mario Party, you want it in a game it’s probably here. Also did I mention music, character progression, and story because these aspects aren’t just top notch for Final Fantasy, they are top notch for the medium.

I don’t know how Square pulled it off but they made one of the most well liked classic cast of characters and made them 100 times more deep, real and relatable. This goes for every party member but two stand out. First is Yuffie. In the original game Yuffie is optional so they didn’t really give her character much more character than “I love materia.” Here she is fully fleshed out, deep, loveable character just as much as everyone else in the party. Secondly is Cait Sith. As much as I loved the original cast I loathed Cait Sith with my entire being. All of my friends I knew that played this game also hated him. But in this game they did the impossible and took him from my one of my very least liked characters made him into an upper tier character. He goes from a legit joke to an amazing, funny, clever, loving character. To me the remakes did more for him than anyone .

The story was magnificent albeit with a some pacing issues. There were so many side quest thrown at you in between small chunks of the story. Outside of that though it was damn near everything you could want. There is some divide between fans on the last chapter but I think it sets up the potential of part 3 extremely well. I want to talk story much more but don’t want to spoil a thing but just know I thought is was S+ tier.

The music was a delight as songs were brilliantly remixed and sometimes used at beautiful or tragic times. This is one of the best Final Fantasy sound tracks, sooo elite of the elite. Two songs that surprisingly were way more catchy than they had any right to be were “bow wow wow” and the Chocobo songs when racing.

The gameplay is by far the best in the series imo with only XVI and Remake coming anywhere close. Everything felt smooth and customizable. Building each character to your unique play style was enjoyable.

The only two downsides I can even see someone arguing against are the final chapter playing out differently than they hoped and the pacing due to side quests. However as someone that thinks the final chapter will be a good springboard into part 3 and wants as much (good) Final Fantasy content that Square can put out these were bonus/non issues for me.

I could legitimately go on about this game for several hours but I don’t want to ramble. I recommend this game 100% and believe it is one of the greatest video games of all time!

This review contains spoilers

This review will contain spoilers

I came back to this version of the game to play the Iki island expansion and decided to play the main story again for the first time since 2020. This remains as one of my favourite games of all time, a mix of a powerful story, amazing combat and breath-taking visuals from start to finish.

To start with the story, the game is set in the late 13th century on the island of Tsushima off the coast of Japan during the Mongol invasion. You play as Jin Sakai, a Samurai who has to grapple with sticking to the Samurai code or breaking it to defeat the invaders. The main game was a lot shorter than I remember it being, with 24 main missions, 25 if you include the prologue. From the second this game starts, you are hit with everything that it has to offer, The Battle of Komoda Beach is probably the best opening in any game I personally have played, the sheer hopelessness as the Mongol army cuts down every Samurai fills you with dread. From here on the game has Jin gathering allies in order to defeat the Mongol invaders and their leader Khotun Khan. During this, Jin deviates from the Samurai code and becomes "The Ghost" in order to safe his people. This is the backbone of the games story, having Jin put in places where he has to break his code to get one over on the enemy whilst being stuck between his allies and his uncle, Lord Shimura. There are a few notable missions but most do feel quite similar but are made better by the combat, My favourite missions is the battle in Yarikawa and the scene where Jin unlocks the ghost stance. I really like how they portray "The Ghost" part of Jin's story as while he thinks he is doing the right thing, it isn't as clean cut as that. In particular the scene where he poisons the Mongol troops in Castle Shimura, he ends up giving the Mongols the ability to make his poison, I like how there are both good and bad sides to what Jin is doing and it isn't as clean cut as Jin good, Samurai bad. One complaint I have is that Jin very easily breaks the Samurai code and I wish they had spent more time having him grapple with the decisions he makes. I also think that they could have maybe made the game a few missions longer as Act 3 ends very quickly only being like 5 missions long. The final missions however, where Jin duels Lord Shimura is so perfectly crafted, similarly to the prologue mission, it has everything that makes this game amazing present. Powerful story, amazing combat, breath taking visuals and a sensational score.

Jin is a really interesting protagonist, considering the whole game revolves around him, he is great in the leading role. Daisuke Tsuji gives an amazing lead performance. Khotun Khan is a very imposing villain, appearing very few times but his presence is felt throughout. Lord Shimura is a great side character, his relationship with Jin is a main focus of the story and is hit out the park. I also really liked Yuna and Lady Masako both being very good side characters and Masakos side quest was my favourite of them.

This game also has my favourite combat system, I think that the sword combat in this game is amazing and it makes the bordering on repetitive missions fun regardless. Jin has 4 stances he can use that are effective on specific enemies, those enemies being regular swordsmen, shield users, spearmen and brutes. The stances are obtained by killing a certain number of Mongol generals, I like that they arent locked behind story progression and effectively you could unlock every stance as soon as you finish the first act. There are also a number of other weapons/items like bows, kunai's, powder bombs and dart guns , providing you with enough weapons to make every encounter unique. I like the horse traversal but half the time it is unnecessary as the fast travel in this game is absolutely insane. Taking seconds to travel from one side of the map to the other, rivalling spiderman 2 for quickest fast travel, and this game game out 3 years before it. I like the way the boss battles are done in a duelling way. Playing on normal, I found most of them quite challenging. I do wish there was a bit more mission variety as most consisted of attacking bases of enemies or tracking someone, It does get a bit repetitive near the end.

Visually this game is stunning, full of vibrant colours and beautiful landscapes. If not for The Last of Us Part 2, this would probably be the best looking game on last gen consoles. Im not sure how accurate the map is to real life, but I think SuckerPunch managed to capture the beauty of Japan really well. The score is equally as amazing, each track fits the moment perfectly, especially in boss fights.

The PS5 directors cut adds enough content to satisfy the price. The Iki island DLC is a good story experience with Jin travelling to the island where his father was killed. He is faced with "The Eagle" who poisons him and forces him to face the guilt he feels over his fathers death. Jin also comes face to face with the man who killed his father and has to overcome his desire for revenge and help the people of Iki island defeat the Mongol invaders. It also adds a couple new side quests, new collectables and minigames to play whilst travelling the island. Very fun experience.

Ghost of Tsushima still sits high on my list of favourite games, it is enjoyable from the minute you turn it on. 100% recommend

Genuinely the best feeling 3D platformer I've played innnnnn gotta be at least 5 years. It's, just, pouring out the seams with charm and earnest love, to the point where the polish feels homemade with its partly-crusty lining. Sometimes for woe though, of course, like when the geometry can ~occasionally~ disagree with your particular momentum and existence. Otherwise it feels as clean as it should be!

It has the makings of doing the Super Mario Odyssey flowchart of hat-tricking, but with detours and digressions from that linear track, encouraged both for score and conserving momentum. Sonic but not-quite-Sonic sprinklings on top, and that all flows together phenomenally. What's altogether more stunning though is it's the only work of its ilk that bothers to really have "level design." There's real guidance through its stages in a way that lets you go absolutely hogwild with its toolkit without ever being 'too open' or 'too constrained.' You can reasonably skip as much as you'd like to by mastering the speed of yo-yo tricks well enough, but there's always some things you Need to do. It's so super encouraging of going for the One-Combo 100% run through its stages, to the point where I actually went and did a few. I can't say a game like this has done that to me! It helps that the music is so bouncy and blissful, and stages never outstay their welcome to where the prospect of "you need to do this entire stage again" is a "absolutely hun let's do even better this time".

My only ~real~ issue is that the swinging and twirling, sadly, lacks enough bite, at least for me. I don't think there's a single stage or moment where the game challenged me, and this is AFTER doing every bonus stage. Sure I can do the one-combos and those can be difficult but with all the skips it's only really as hard as I let it be? Even though it's not uncharacteristic for such a clearly soft platformer, I find myself so unsatisfied with the lengths the game really went to, especially when the final boss was more of a wet fart than a real demonstration of the game's skills, or like, your performance as an artist!!! Give it an encore! A real spicy star road!

I just absolutely adored this game and could not put it down. I love tactics games and this unique turned based hybrid real time was just perfect for me.

Lets start with the story. There are some good twists overall but it's a pretty simple fantasy storyline of good vs evil which I really enjoyed. The characters are great and I love how involved with the story most of them are. They also have dedicated support conversations for every characters which fleshes out all the characters nicely. You are able to choose a partner in marriage which plays a big part in the story with a nice fully voiced proposal scene. The support conversations reminded me a lot of Fire Emblem which you can see this game has heavy inspiration from.

The gameplay as I mentioned combines turned based strategy with real time. Throughout the game you will earn honor points which let you upgrade how many units each battalion can hold. You only start out with 2 units per battalion but you will eventually get to twelve units with 5 characters per. This sounds confusing but it all gets introduced slowly and is easy to wrap your head around. You move these battalions in real time but can pause at any time. You setup what characters and what type of moves you want them to do most often or for specific circumstances. There is a ton of customization and it's a lot of fun to experiment. They have a bunch of different difficulty options which give you different levels to find your perfect comfort zone, and it can be changed whenever.

The world map is the biggest and best surprise about this game. It is fully interactive with tons of resources and secrets to find. Each village you build up with increase your honor score and then you can assign a guard which will auto gather resources for you. The graphics are just gorgeous in typical Vanillaware fashion. The characters always look great and the battles are super flashy.

Overall I just adore this game and can't say enough good things about it. Vanillaware you did again!

This style of game simply isn’t for me at all. I honestly don’t think I will try another game like it. I tried Journey twice because of the people raving about it and just didn’t enjoy myself at all. So I thought I’d give the genre one more try and I wish I didn’t. I get that it’s relaxing to many people and maybe even therapeutic but for me I’d rather just watch a video about ocean life on YouTube.

Wake up honey time for your Competent Indie Platformer with Adequate Movement and Decent Aesthetics #735. Ugh fine extra star because drills are cool

This replay has re-confirmed I still love this linear adventure through Not Hawaii quite a lot. This game's characters, art/colour direction, location design, and music owns. I don't have any major complaints with the gameplay too. Good encounter variety, no need to grind, boss fights are challenging enough on Set mode.

This is still comfortably one of my favourite mainlines behind BW/2 and RSE. I love Alola.


Tony Hawk's pro skater 2 is a very impressive port for the Game Boy Advance. Most games that use 3D on the GBA tend to be very choppy and slow, however this game will always run flawlessly. I have never been terribly interested in skateboarding video games and have never played any of the console Tony Hawk games, so I can't compare this game to its console counterparts, but i can say on its own I found it decently entertaining in short bouts which is perfect for the GBA. My one complaint is that the game features a free mode as well as a career mode, but i find there is no point in ever touching the career mode as it's just the free mode with a time limit and some objectives scattered about, but it is nice to have the option and it gives the game a little variety. For knowing very little about skateboarding, i think this game is pretty good.

Eu tinha planos para esse mês, mas nunca imaginaria que eu estaria passando os últimos dias dele consumindo os filmes de Scooby Doo que fossem do meu interesse, e a surpresa que foi ao descobri que tinha um jogo especifico para um dos filmes que estavam na lista, decidi experimentar e curti muito, os controles truncados, os gráficos poligonais, a dublagem em inglês, tudo que poderia ser visto de forma negativa, foi oq me fez continuar a jogar, eu genuinamente amo essa estética
A única coisa que posso reclamar eh o fato dos controles se tornarem muito ruins em partes especificas do jogo, mas ainda aprecio o fato de toda fase ter pelo menos uma mecânicazinha diferente, foi muito bom joga isso

For starters, I was not expecting myself to have binge this game so soon after buying the game.

FF7 was not the first game I was originally intending to play in this series but I couldn't help still wanting to play it due to recommendations from friends and as rebirth has just came out.

What I hadn't expect though was a story, so entrenched in so many ideas that I think it reasons that it stands the test of time. From the beginning, insinuating a anti-corporation stance with Barret and Avalanche, it truly immerses you to midgar.

What this game does with it's protagonist has to be one of the most touching story I've seen in gaming. Cloud's character paved the way for a lot of my favourite characters in some shape or form, but that's not even the full brunt on what makes me appreciate him. His inspirations and insecurities are at the heart of the story. They somehow managed to trick me multiple times in terms of reveals that one its all said and done, it does so in such a profound and human way.

It feels like a triumph in storytelling and video games and I'm genuinely happy I got to experience this classic to it's fullest.